Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online

The Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online website is designed to be a comprehensive information source and archive for Eamon adventures. This blog consists of both news about Eamon and my random thoughts about Eamon and the Eamon website.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Derek C. Jeter scoured the Eamon database and came up with this handy way to examine all of the Eamon Deluxe adventures. You can inspect each adventure's rooms, artifacts, monsters and effects. If you get stuck in an adventure, this is great place to find all the hidden doors and embedded artifacts.Check it out at http://dcsoftsys.com/eab/

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Recently, Michael Detlefsen, one of two individuals who ported Eamon to the Atari ST, has posted two Eamon-related items for the PC to the Internet Archive. Each is an AGT (Adventure Game Toolkit)-authored adventure game, playable on MS-DOS and hence (presumably) Windows. Detlefsen shepherded his Atari port by hosting it on GEnie, writing the single Eamon newsletter, and manually translating several adventures to the platform. However, Detlefsen at some point abandoned Eamon development and embraced the AGT platform.

The first is an expanded version of Evan Hodson's Quest for the Holy Grail, a riff of the Monty Python film. Holy Grail was one of the Eamons Detlefsen ported to the Atari ST; after adopting the AGT platform, he made additional enhancements to the game by adding puzzles, rewriting descriptions, and making further changes. The Misadventure of the Holy Grail, the enhanced version of Quest for the Holy Grail, can be downloaded here.

The second is a port of Detlefsen's aborted Eamon adventure The Star Portal. Detlefsen made a report on his progress in the Atari Eamon newsletter, mentioning that he has "blocked out" sixty rooms for the map, but never completed the Eamon version. After abandoning Eamon and adopting AGT, Detlefsen resumed work on Star Portal, winning an honorable mention in the Second AGT Game Contest. A review can be found here and the game itself can be downloaded here.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

KansasFest, the venerable Apple II gathering running for a quarter of a century, hosts a recurring contest called "HackFest." The winner this year was none other than Margaret Anderson, the author of four Eamons (Peg's Place, The Beginner's Forest, Treasure Island, and The Pirate's Cave), who submitted an "Eamon mapper" as her entry. While the site is not presently hosting a disk image of her winning entry, it appears that disk images of entries are posted from time to time at http://www.kansasfest.org/hackfest/.

Margaret Anderson also wrote an article "Mapping the Unknown: An Adventure in Eamon" about her entry in the September 2013 issue of Juiced.GS. I don't have a subscription to Juiced.GS, so I'm unable to describe the contents of the article. But I'd love to hear a synopsis in the comments (or see a disk image of Ms. Anderson's entry!).

Friday, December 13, 2013

Pat Hurst, over the course of his universally highly regarded Eamon adventures, attempted to unify the details of the fictional planet Eamon, providing an coherent story concerning Eamon's geography, politics, and pantheon. The Main Hall, according to Hurst's continuity, lies in the city of Evenhold, on the coast of the Malphigian sea. Beyond his four adventures—The Pyramid of Anharos, Buccaneer!, Grunewalde, and The Dark Brotherhood—Hurst's ideas informed Mike Ellis' Well of the Great Ones (as well as A Runcible Cargo). Hurst's portrait of Eamon was made concrete by a sort of "series bible," the Eamon Gazetteer, mentioned several times in the EAG Newsletter.

Huw Williams—super sleuth that he is—was able to not only track down Pat Hurst, but also coaxed him into scanning a copy of the fabled Gazetteer, a copy of which may be found at www.eamononline.com. Both scanned and transcribed versions are posted. It's a very entertaining read and a very rich component of Eamon history, so make sure to check it out.

Sunday, December 01, 2013

What's it like for someone to discover Eamon for the first time? Jalen Wanderer over at http://comparativecreation.blogspot.com/ has come across Eamon and is considering writing a new adventure for the system. It's an interesting read for those of you who have known Eamon for years and years!

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Chester Bolingbroke, author of the excellent blog The CRPG Addict found at crpgaddict.blogspot.com, has written a couple of posts on Donald Brown's SwordThrust, the commercial successor to Eamon. The first post details the game and Bolingbroke's thoughts on it, while the second post is more detailed, and even contains some insight by the only non-Don-Brown author of SwordThrust, Peter Wityk

Bolingbroke has also written an in-depth FAQ/Walkthrough of SwordThrust. The document is very thorough, documenting the history and gameplay of the system, as well as walkthroughs and maps for all seven adventures written for it.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Readers will recall a pair of posts concerning one of Eamon's cousins, the Commodore 64 text adventure system Imagery!. For those not recalling them, part one and part two will direct you to the blog of our comrades at Doctor Evil Laboratories, featuring a wonderfully written retrospective of the rise and fall of the company.

Well, I sadly missed it this last month, but the concluding chapter of our friend Kent Sullivan's history of Dr. Evil Labs went up in September. You needn't be familiar with C64 jargon to enjoy the blog posts; Kent's writing really outlines a coming of age story that only incidentally contains C64 jargon.

There isn't a concise web address for the Dr. Evil Labs blog, but you can get to the blog by clicking here and you can read the last installment here.